features beryl satter, the author of "family properties: race, real estate, and the exploitation of black urban america". published earlier this year by metropolitan books. my name is eric arnesen. i'm a professor of history at the unirsity of illinois at chicago, and i will be talking about her book before we open up the discussion to you, our audience members. ..

>> city officials allod the construction of public housing only in already-black areas while engages in rural program that is raised healthy black neighborhoods. minorities were experiencing racial change. while federally ensured mortgages went to whites in all while areas. a free marke in real estate was a complete myth. but if anyone thought the accounts by the historians have told us, the new book quickly

proves them wrong. "family properties" does not retell a depressing tale but yet weaves the sto of his family into a economic exemployeation and individual and community activism. the results, i would suggest, is moving and eloquent account of the forces black chicagoans were up against and the efforts of reformers black and white to combat them. "family properties" is organized by the neighborhoods decline and her father's crusade on its behalf. the west side of lawndale here in chicago was transformed as local whites moved and souther replaced them. into this picture stepped mark

satter, a progressive, passionate, and driven lawyer who's increasingly black and poor clients provided him with a first-hand information with the black people inproverrished and the neighborhoods blighted. he learned about the devastating of effects of contract selling, the restrictions to the specific sections and the mortgages forc those committed to buying home to turn to contract sellers. specklators who sold property on the nstallment plans. they mislend clients, concealed repairs, demanded large down payments, and insists on prompt monthly payments. purchasers who missed a single yment could lose everything. they would reclaim the property and repeat the process again and again. the process was widespread and

has devastating consequences for individual and communities. her fatr waged a lonely crusade against contract selling and related practices in the courts in newspaperolumns and speeches and television and radio appearances. this would have made compelling the reading. but the family connection goes deeper. the father also owned property and allowed his critics to charge him and called him a slum lord. whenever else it is, it is a study of oppression and resistance. now a few words of introduction for our distinguishing author, beryl satter. a native of the chicago area, beryl received infer b.a. from barb aired and phd from

harvard. she is the ahor of each mind a kingdom, "american women," "sexl purity." her articles have appeared in a variety of journals including "u.s. catholic historian historian." please join pea inng withing beryl satter. >> well, thank you. that was a wonderful introduction. i didn't know until a few minutes ago that i was supposed to speak myself. i thought i just have to answer questions. what shall i say? one thing i will say is that the book i think is different from other books that deal with racial change in chica that

bale with housing discrimination in part because i wasn't trained in those fields. if youeard him talk about the earlier publications,hey are about the history of swalety and women's history. and that is what i was trained in. i had the academic discipline. i knew how to be a historian. i was not imbued with the concerns and preconceptions and preoccupation that structure a lot of urban history. because i didn't -- i just wasn't -- hadn't read much of it. so the book really grew out of talking to real people. you know, chicagoans, reading and looking at any father's papers, just following the trails, calling, you know, in the beginning, my brother paul had saved my fathers papers

afteris death in 1965. i was only 6 when my father died. i didn't know him personally in a way. i knew him as a small child. i started with these papers that had been collected by a 16-year-old kid. at his father's death they were kind of random. they were pretty good. but it was not a professional job. it was just what the kid could grab. d i went through and them i remember feeling intimidated, i can't write this book. i don't understand mortgages. i don't want to understand mortgage you know? i didn't think that was the most interesting topic in the world. once i understood that, my father's activism was trying to keep people in their homes. i thought oh, no, let me just put any father papers in archive and let someone else do it. i don't want to spend the time

on trying to figure out economics. then i realized that i was the best person to write the book, not because i was going to glorify my father -- not because of personal connection but because i was bad at this stuff. i thought it would mean that i would have to understand very thoroughly and have to write very clearly to make it work. where someone who has been trained in all this stuff, they use the shorthand. and they think think understand before they start. an i knew i didn't know anything. so it made it easier in a way to just really tell the story in a human way based on what i learned from the people i interviewed and on the sources that i read. so i pieced it together bit by bit and came up with a story of a whole city. the story of racial change on the west side, mostly a bit on the south side, about the mostly white specklators who profited

from it and business people and mortgage bankers. the people black and white who ught to better their communities. so i don't know it's just kind of rambling. but it was a big leap of faith for me to even try to do this. one i started talking to people and started to understand how important all was. these were real people's lives. these were stories that hadn't been told. i knew i had to do it. and it took me nine years. that may seem hugely long, and it is. it's not that unusual for historians. we tend to take a long time to do the research, we spend a lot of time in archives and the interviews had to be transcribed and study them and piece tm together. i think chicagoans who read the

book recognize a true picture. i've been getting a good response, mostly in chicago especially. people say i knew this person, i lived this experience, and no one has ever made sense of it fore. and i made sense of it by staying away from the there ritz -- theories and sticking to more investigator reporting. following the money, which is something that my father did. back in the '60s and '50s, people were busy blaming african-american culture as they do today for the decline of black communities. and my father would say this is ridiculous. look at the money. follow the money. where is the money gng? who's profiting? that's what matters. we can't blame people for ideas about what their culture is based on that are written by the people at university of chicago and places who hav no

first-hand experience. i become more and more of a anti-academic writing this book, i am embarrassed to say. reading what the academic were saying versus people on the ground was so different. and it's -- i've learn to trust a different group of people. and i do think that following how money moves through a city and how power operates in a city is the number one thing to know. so my father story started me on this path. he died. one of the reasons i thought i wouldn't write the book is because he died so young at the age of 49 in 1965. in 1965, what happened then? then when i found out about the contract buyers league and the activism that came after his death i knew i had a real story to tell. one that had the activism of

really courageous, brilliant, really resourceful and wonderful people to be part of the story as well. and so i tell two hals in the book. i'll get eric ask me questions to get more of the story. >> thank you. i get the opportunity to talk with beryl for a little bit. then we'll turn over our remaining time to y'all. you will note the microphone in the center of the room. when we do open it up, please make your way to the microphone. if you could line up and speak directly into it, we would appreciate that. let me begin with something that struck me while i was reading the book, that is the theme of discovery. there is i think you're discovery of your father's story asking questions of family members and piecing together

things that perhaps people didn't want to talk about. but there was also and this i the core of the book your faer's discovery. you mentioned follow the mey. the discovery of contract selling and its impact on african-americans in this city. this was an eye-opening discovery tt his own compliants brought him too by simply coming to him and saying we have a problem. could you first talk about what he learned on the ground as an attorney? clients come to him, what do they team him? >> my father was a general practice attney with the -- he handled a wide range of topics. he wasn't a specialist in real estate in particular. but what happened is in 1957 the black couple came to him. they said we are being evicted from our house. he said sure, let me ask you about this place.

where is it? what's the address? what did you pay for it? what's the general situation. and what they told him was they had paid almost 14,000 for this property in hyde park. he thought that's mightyigh. he went over to cityall and look at the records and he found that the person who sold thdm the property for $13,900 had brought it himself just a few weeks before he sol it to them for $4,300. and he thought, wow, that's quite the mark up. the other thing he discovered is the man who sold him the property was the owner of the property. the guy who brought it for $4,300 and then sold it $,900, claimed to be a real estate, and he sold him his own property for

almost quad quadruple. that was interesting. he pieced it together, and he got more of the story. not only did he do that, he never told him that he was the owner. he sold it to them on contract on installment contract which meant that they put money down but that they wouldn't get i think it was the $750 and that may seem low. but in the mid '50s, you can guy a new house for $500 down. they were playing personal. they wouldn't get ownership until e entire property for paid inull. you start to explain it. so, you know, found this out, and he said to them. you know, you're in a peril louse situation.

they had the stipulation if you missed one payment the property reverts to the sellers. if you are paying quadruple, the chances are missing a payment are high. on top of that, the man who was the owner b pretended to not be the owner and acting like he was the real estate also acted as their attorney when they said the price is high but maybe we can pull it off. we're both working. we just want to talk to an attorney. we'll be backoon. he said no i'm an attorney. don't worry. my office can handle it all, save you a lot of money. i'll be your attorney. this is a lot of bad behavior. and so once this is all put togeer, my father, you know, was horrified. he and his assistant also be some research and found that the same man who sold them the property and was not about to take it back because they missed a payment had actually done -- was going out about 30 or 40

other people who had missed payments that year. and you know, 50 the year before. it was obviously a large-scale situatio where they were selling a lot of properties, taking down payments, waiting for people to miss, and reselling the same property. so when the bolton's you know learned when my father had found out when he learned from them, they had decided to say we're going to go after this guy and try to stop him for unconscionable behavior. what he had done was not illegal. but if you line a contract, you line a contract. by father wanted to argue that it was not illegal but it was unconscionable, to sell your own property, say you're an attorney and you're not. you need behave on behalf of

your clients not yourself. he was horrified. he understand that this meant that african-american who had no choice but to buy on contract since they were cut out from mortgages were being subjected to a large-scale racquet was that exploits and leading to the deline of property in communities all across chicago. >> so he pulls this thread. and he discovers a group of specklators who are deeply involved in exploiting a fairly impoverished group of chicago i knows. he pursued their case in court. he also discovered this is not just a matte of a few bad apples or specklator, but there's a systemic quality. he runs up against brick walls. he finds other attorneys and profession gnats and judges in

chicago toe unsympathetic to the cases of his clients. could you talk about that sort of larger participation of so ma other professionals in the city? >> first of all, i want to say that it wasn't a matter of impoverished clients. black chicago in the '50s, they were doing pretty well. and that' one of the things i'm trying to counter is the book is the sense that public television documentaries a things that black people move north and they came north, they moved to the north and they were poor and stayed poor and they were just poor people. you know, there is some sort of idea that black poor are poor people. i know that's not what you meant. but it's there. and irritating. because it's not factual. that's why my book is called the

exemployeation. tey are made poor by certain unethical actors who are taking advantage of a structul situation se up by the federal government, the federal housing administration that created a nationwide blockage of mortgage money for african-american. the bolton's were not, it is common for many black families the husband and wife both work. they were doing okay. they would have been fine if they didn't have to pay quadruple. if they could have paid $5,000 for it. that's what's happening. that's the key to this story. it's about people who should have done every bit as well as white people similarly situated with silar jobs but they can't because of having to pay so much more for basic, you know, housing needs.

so as far as the complicity of te rest of the city, you know, it's a machine city as we know then and now. it's the judiciary is very tied into the political structure. it was an overwhelming white judiciary. they didn't have empathy, some did, a few were here and there. there was a judge or two who would say, gosh, that's terrible. we'll give them a break. but most the time they said a contract is a contract and we just don't care. but beyond that it was that once you went -- a specklator would buy a house oa property with the mortgage often, resell it on contract, so they'd pay $8,000 for a house and sell it on contract to a black couple of usually something like $16r 17 about double sometimes more.

they clect the payments for a year and have taken the down payment. then they say we are done, they'd sell that contract paper to another investors for say $12,000. so they paid $8,000. the black family owes $16,000. they are selling it another investor for $12,000. i'm paying $12,000 on which people owe me $16,000. so i have a deal. and the specklator, i got e money. they would sell the paper it all kinds of white professionals all across the city, attorneys, judges, politicians, dentists, doctors, people who were interested in looking for a nice investment. that widened the circle greatly. so that's part of the story too. and that is the way it's similar

to today's prime crisis where, you know, people are over indebted by mortgage bankers and then brokers and then the paper is sold off and it's not their problem anymore. >> let me psue the discovery or the surprises aspect of this. your father may have discovered a world of contract selling in this process. you discovered your father, a complex, sometimes difficult often courageous man who's own development in real estate was a source of some friction within the family and exposed him as he crusaded to charges. could you talk about the buildings? >> right, the buildings. part of what got me interested in working on learning about my father i guess was the mystery

of the buildings. my father had owned four apartment buildings on the west side of chicago, lawndale neighborhood. he had grew up in lawndale. he had a hard condition that he knew about. he always knew that his health was fragile and he might not live a long life. he become an attorney and tried to protect his famy. these properties were going to be the thing that would enable his family to svive if something were to happen to him. if he were to have to work less hours, anything, you know, they were his investment for his future. and he invested in the neighbor that he knew and where he lived. so that even though he was working all day, he could come in the evening and walk a few blocks and look in on his

property. he had these properties. and all i knew growing up i heard these stories that there were the buildings. and i knew there was some pain around the buildings. i knew we didn't have them. but at some point they had been sold. and i knew they had en sold for not much or almost nothin was the family story, and i knew my relatives were upset about it. they felt my father had gambled his family futures on some buildings. and when he died and the buildings were worthless we were left with no security. so that was a story. and i was curious about it. because i knew he was a crusader. on one hand i had heard that he had helped black people with property somehow. and there was the his own properties that had become worthless. and i knew there was some they

the tales came together. i wanted to figure outow that happened. so one of the first thing i did investigating the book was ask about the buildings, interview my relatives about the buildings, do property research, figure out where they were and what happened to them. basically, how would you describe it? he was caught in the same cycle that any white property owner faced once a neighborhood started tgo down. he wasn't exempt from the decline of a community. he couldn't stop it single handedly. basically, i think i need to explain what happens when you have a community in which there's a lot of contract selling going on. you have a situation where people are paying quadruple for their properties, double to quadruple and they can't miss a payment. that means they can't maintain and overcrowd the property to

get more tenants in to keep those payments up. once you put the down payment and pay for several years, you don't want to lose it all. contract sellers were very active in the areas where his properties which is one of the reasons he was fighting them. he was fighting not only an injustice, but he was fighting a process that going to destroy his own community where he had put everything where he had gambled everything in the hopes that it would sustain him. so it was very personal for him fighting these specklators. he knew them well, not only from seeing them in court all the time. but he knew, you know, block by block and house by house where they were. so this whole process of racial antagonisms because the white people in neighborhoods where contract sellers were active and selling the properties that exploit the the prices to

african-american, they saw black people moving in and immediately overcrowding the property, not maintaining the property, working all kinds of jobs and the kids running wild. well, they have to work double shifts. how else are they going to keep up the payments. white people see the results, not the cause. if you could leave, you leave. once that situation is going on but mfather couldn't leave. he couldn't leave for a lot of reasons, one being, you know, the issue of hip pock si. what he's going to tell people. if only we stay and fight, it'll be okay, but i'm leaveing. it wasn't something he could do. he wasn't -- when whites left these neighborhood where exploited contracting was concentrated, who's going to buy from them athing? only the specklators. he wasn't going to sell to these people. no one is going to buy into this community once they start going down. so he was stuck in a terrible

downward cycle that he well understood but could do nothing about. all he could do is keep putting money into the properties. if you didn't maintain them perfectly, he was under a microscope, people were watching, enemies, people who didn't like them, people who said how dare you tell the world what you were doi. they were the ones that understand the process and were good at it. and my father named their names and got in trouble. they fought back by saying you're a slum lord, you're letting in the tenants. you have a faulty water fixture. weaw the write up from the building code guy. it was a very hard situation. in the end, you know, he on his death bed said we have to hold on. we have two more, three more years. we'll own tm all and it will

help my widow, my wife, my five children. but after his death, my mother couldn't hold on to them. she couldn't afford to because just the copayments alone were mor than she could handle. and she ended up having to -- it's the story in the book about how these belie get sold. it's a origin tragedy. but it's a tragedy, part of the reason i thought it was so important to tell the story in part because you can't not tell it, it's essential to the actual life of this real person that i'm talkg about, my father. but also it's an example of what happened to whites in in neighborhood. black people were exploited viciously through contract selling. but whites who wanted to stay as neighbors in the communities also didn't have a lot of choices. they could stay and watch the neighborhoods decline. they couldn't really stop it because they couldn't get mortgage money for blacks.

the white neighborhoods didn't quite have that power. many didn't want to leave and they didn't want to have to sell to specklators. but they had to. for many it was a bitter pill. and it made them feel driven out and created a lot of anger. and the anger and bad feeling in my family was not too different from that of other whites who are lived in this neighborhood and felt they had to leave whether they wanted to or not. >>he question of who is sponsible for neighborhood decline was one that was heatedly discussed and controversial then a one that remains with us today. your father look that position that structural forces are fundamentally at work depriving black communities of tir economic resources, contributing to the spiral of deterioration. your brother, david, your older brother, drew different conclusions after your father's death. and he represented a very different political interration

o spin on this process. one that is still with us in some political circles today. could you talk a little bit abou his visionr his interration and then we can open up to the audience to discuss? >> okay. i hope we can talk about the contract buyers league later. because we're spending a lot of time on the first half which is about my family. my brother david was 17 almost 18 when my fathdr died. he was quite young, also. he was the oldest of the five of us. and he was the student at the university of chicago. and after my father's death he went -- he turned 18, he was the sophomore by then, and he wrote an article about the west side of chicago criticizing martin luther king's crusade at that point in chicago. and he argued that the problem on the west side was there were

too many welfare recipients out there and well far recipients didn't have a steak in their communities and therefore destroyed them. they tore down the properties in which they lived through bad -- through just destructive behavior. and he wrote an article making this point. and the article, even though he was just 18, an unknown 18-year-old sophomore at university of chicago, the article ma quite an impact. people loved it. white people loved it. they thought wow here's someone telling the truth about the west side. which is part of my -- why i sometimes question academic. because there was an academic analysis going on at the time about, you know, bad culture destroying communities. he said into that, he picked up

on it. so he wrote this article in -- he published in it the campus university of chicago magazine. he got an immense reaction from the president of the school and all kinds of people around the school who wrote him a lot of letters. he then rewrote it and it was published in the "new republic." they published the article calls it the west side story:home is where the well far check comes. it was then picked up by a prominent "washington post" journalist who wrote aut it in a column. and in short, my 18-year-old kid brother became quite famous for saying this about the west side. and i wrote about it in the book within and part of it is an example of what the media will pick up and how they won't. because my father wrote on

trying to explain the complications forces that were going on that were destroys the west side and he submitted his article to the "new republic" and it was regretted. then they pick up an 18-year-old kid. my brother was a great writer. he's a very talented guy. he told me later when i interviewed him about it, he said it was an emotional reaction. he said he had been out to our father properties and some of the uni had been destroyed by tenants. we felt the tenants who are reed havoc had writted to our father's death by creating economic stress and makg it impossible for him to keep the buildings like he wanted to. i was defending himself against people that i thought had hurt him. and it was a very personal thing. and in my book i show that, you know, destructive tenants and

welfare is not always aligned. no, ma'am recipients are reinstructive and some are fanttic. they don't go together. but my brother put them together. and we see the greater claim for it. i gather you've been studying this for many years, and the kid was 1 so it was shocking. but it's an example of how power works. and i, you know, i was initially surprised when i read the article as an adult what my brother had written. i don't blame him for it. but i think there's something about the way it was received that is indicative of the way the media publishes what it wants to hear and is highly critical. in fact my brother had changed the names and made up parts of

the article to make it read better and no one ever investigated a single aspect of it, and they should have. you know? but in a way the article was another reaction to pain. human beings experiencing pain and their families, people who are suffering in all kinds of ways and not just, you know, evil specklators questioning good people. there's that of course. but the repercussions come out in a wide way. people react in human ways to hurt. and i wri about that and try to make it three dimensional and real. and that's why i included my brother's story in the book. >> thank you. we have time for a number of questions. if you could come up to the microphone. keep your questions brief so we

can get at least a couple of them in. >> good morning. can you hear me? where was the churches and synagogues? >> well, back then it was in daily's pocket. there was basically you know one independent and the other 49 voted with dailynd did was daily wanted. black chicagoans called them the silent six because they were in hi control. so they were no help. many of them were part of the system in that they -- they knew the building inspectors who could be encouraged to write up some code violations if a specklator wanted somebody out. so no help there the churcs and synagogues, my father spoke at a lot of churches and synagogues.

so there was mixed feelings among them. supportive groups and less supportive ones. after my father's death, they got an immense amount of help from the catholic church and from some jewish synagogues from some protestant groups. but that was not late60s. by then the situation had gotten so extreme. early on, they sluggh and me likely to fight. >> it's integration had been garble on the south side neighborhoods instead of hole-sale by whites, do you think the neighborhood would be beer off or do you tnk they were desned to decline? >> well, i think you have to

understand the way the fha, federal housing administration, structured this hole thing. i think that was behind the wholesale of whites andecline of communities. the way the fha worked with they only -- they would not ensure mortgages in changing neighbor hoods. if a few black men moved in, they wouldn't ensure neighborhoods there. they found one would loan to a black family moving into a white neighborhood, that is the black family who wants if get out activity completely packed black ghetto. so they can't get out with a relar mortgage. they can't buy in on a fair pbice on fai terms and live i a responsible, i mean it's less likely.

so white people may not have understand exactly what was going on, but they knew that once black people started moving in, they wld usually guy in on contract at high prices and having to ovcrowd the properties. they also knew that white people knew the area was red lined once blacks moved in. what they understand was that suddenly they can't get -- it's hard for them to sell the property and get a loan to buy there. the whole community is written off. so they have to get out in a way. they have to leave. the quicker they leave the better, because basically you have people going door to door ying blacks are coming. if you want to sell to me now, i will give you $8,000 for your property which is worth $8,000. if you want to wait a month i'll give you $7,000 if yo want to wait two months i'll give you $5,000. wait and leave less or now leave and get something close.

so they left. there was an idea ifnly they had stayed, everything uld have been fine. in a way they couldn't stay. itas just too risky. they were lectured by well marining liberals that said what's wrong with you? i knew they we the people who were having to call in the middle of the night saying you want to sell? there was specklators really pushing to get people out. does that answer the question? >> one last question. >> i enjoyed reading the book a great deal. it was the review in the "chicago reader" and i bought it. i was wondering if you could maybe ta about the difference between the grass roots vers roots ground. i was real fascinated by your

kind of complex take on alinsky. being his anniversary. >> sure. i have very fast. specially he always wanted to win. what i think about is that the forces that hurt black people are complicated. and you can't always assume you will win. if you are staying i will only fight when i win, you are saying you will not fight when you don't think you can win. he was too oriented towards winning in a way that meant he could only ta on simple things. this contract buyers league did not feel that way. they were willing to ta on foreigns of explorations that people understood and fought and won a lot. aliny would have said won't >> there's so much more in this

book that we haven't been able to touch upon today. so i recommend that you go out of this room, there are copies out there that you can purchase and beryl will be available to sign tse books. i want to thankur speaker and audience for coming out. so we appreciate it. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> now more from day two of "chicago tribune" fest. . >> thank you. i'm at richard nixon when i was 13 years old. he was campaigning in bloomfield, new jersey, in 1968 campaign. i guess a republican can still

go to new jersey. he gives a speech. at thend of the speech i went up to him and handed him a pad and a pen and asked himor an autograph. and he tried to sign it with the wrong end of the pen. i ould have figur then this is not going to end well. so i flipped the pen around and got an autograph from him. d i thought 13 year old said this ia nice guy. within a couple of years w were still in vietnam, and i was getting close to draft age and i hated him. and rich office my own little personal nixonland. i met nader when i was 17. he was in new jersey speaking to a crowd. heas a very patient man about being interviewed by a teenage journalist. so i really liked nader. in those days, everybody liked

nader, unless you are the ceo of a car company. so i was thinking about reading those two books. you probably couldn't think of two differenteople than richard nixon and ralph nader during these times p but whatever organized and put the two of you together is genius. i think we are going to see that all of the chaos and may ham and anger all game home to roost in the campaigns that trier 15 was involveed in 2004. rich is the author of nixonland. he also wrote before the storm, and the "unmasking of the american consensus." he is working now on a book about right-hand reagan.

theresa is the author of gnd delusion, the myth of a voice in two-party tyranny. she was the campaign manager in nader in 2000 and 2004. it looks at how the u.s. political system freezes out competition from the third parties and independent candidates. and i want to ask each of them to give us a snapshot of their books to get into conversation about them, rick? >> sure my book is sequel. the first book was called before the storm. and it was about the rise of the forces that mad barry goldwater, the republican nominee. of course he was very conservative. he lost to lyndon johnson. and all o them declared that conservatism was done for. and eight years later, richard nixon of course wins 49 states

in a landslide even greater. nixonland is a bookbout what happened in the eight years and whynd argues that the political division that we know now were forged during those 1950s years in blood and fi. $1960s years in blood and fire. >> well, "grand illusion" is part memoir of how we conducted election and barriers to entry. everybody grows up under the myth that anybody can grow up and beresident in the unite states this is true if you are a democrat or a republican. but not necessarily true if you are in a third party or independent. we have so many barriers in ple toy against fair competition for third parties and independents. everything fro the ballot

access systems. we have 51 sets of state determinedallot access ruled that are mind boggling and make it impossible for third parties and independents to try to complete in a level playing field. we have to some extent a host ill media. we all brew up also with the alst internal bias. we learned in grade school where the two-partyystem. and everything from the federal election commision regulations to how we conduct presidential debates. and the presidential debate commission. the exclusion their rules tt don't really invite third pty and independent candidates to put their alternative voices and put alternative choices for the american voters on theallot. so it is as somewhat of a both a history of informed by my

perspective running both ralph neighedders 2000 and 2004y also informed by two decades at the local level, national level, and how the government interacts with citizens and what choices you have. >> theresa were your book is just out, but it's already made some news. the book says that terry mccall who was the head of the democrat party the dnc at the time trying to buy overall of nader. i want you to tell us, offering a deal if he would stay off the ballot in 19 key states. >> sure. there was about half of the population of the united states that didn't want ralph nader to run for president in 2004 because of the scapegoating and the what i would call the spoiler mean that occurred after 2000. because thought, and i thought

erroneously that ralph nader somehow was the dispositive cause. if you have any sense of how difficult it is for third-party to competes, i liken it in the book to blaming a start up for microsoft or apple has more market share. it's very difficult. in florida there was eight third parties on the ballot. and all of them got more than the 537 vote difference between george bush and al gore. but the only person who wa quote blamed for this was the person that got the most votes and that was ralph nader. and so in the historical context there were a lot of people if you are straight democratarty line or you thought george bush was the worst president to t

the united states of america at we're very afraid that there would be a rept of 2000. and instead of targeting some of this fear at where i think it should have been appropriately targeted and that is our partisan administration of elections, the incompetence and vast imperfections that exist at the state level, how we personal registrations, how we don't have standards amongst the states for what counts as a vote or how a recount should be conducted or how people are able to cast their ballotnd all of these things that go into play. that sets the context. getting to bruce's question. so a lot of people tried to make sure that ralph nader didn't run in 2004. but of course the democrat party first amongst them.

and yes there was a phone call that i was on in june 2000 err terry mccall paceically called ralph nader to stay out of his 19 states and offered unspecified resoues if he could only campaign in 31 and stay out of 19 states. now the hole conversation made me uncomfortable. of course ralph nader is not for sale. he wasn't going to say, oh, yes. of course not. he didn't get into that at all. he said it was 50-state campaign. then terry mccall started naming the states that the nader campgn of 2004 had to stay out of. and he said they supported the litigation that had occurred that day in arizona to baically make sure that ralph was going to get tested,itigated, every paper clip, every stap the was going to be tested on the petitis for how to get on the

ballot in these battle ground states. it turned the out over the course of the next 12 weeks we would be sued two dozen times across the country to make sure that rph nader and peter were not a choice for american voters on state ballots. and of course we fought as hard as we could and made sure we got on most of those. because a lot of this is trivial kinds of litigation. and i don't know how many people have spent half of their workdays over the course of 12 weeks starting their morning with the service and summons and a complaint against you, let me tell you, not a fun way to beg your morning is being sued by the democrat party or its allies across the country. and the idea behind it artistlated was to make it

difficult, drain our resources, make it impossible for us to run in united states of america. >> but i mention there's a lot ofeople who wish they had succeeded. there is no question that if nade had not been on the ballot in florida bush wouldn't have won the election. i know you've been asked it a lot. there's probably a whole lot of people who want to ask. why shouldn't ralph nader bear the blame for the eleion of george bush? >> well, the assumption in that question that all third party ifs you got the margin of difference between one of the two parties shouldn't be allowed to run. that's the deduction of the assumption in that questio that for som reason it's reordained, your vote as an american voter is preordained to go to one of the major parties. this shows bedon't have a good

understanding of the history. i'm sitting nex to premier historian. >> nader should have seen these two candidates and said one was better than the other and stayed away. >> first of all, that's not his view. it may have been that one was better than the other but only at margins. in terms of what he looked at, every agency in washington, d.c., he could have said that both parties flunks and the weren't doing a good job. every four years we trap ourself into this lesser evil kind of choice. well, i'm going to vote for the democrat because they are not as bad as the republicans. i'm going to the vote for the republan because they are not as bad. what about the concept of open competitn? when you go to the story, do you only want to buy one of two or only one bird or another bird? what about having political ecodiversety? and the concept that we are

stuck in this two-party system is first not historian preordained. there's nothing in the constitution, the word party doesn't even appear. historicically, we've had lots of parties who had sent members to congress and have run at t local level and state level. it's only been in the last five or six decades that we've made it impossible top send someone from a third party to congress. why blame ralph that nobody blamed pat brew cannon about mexico. take any of the third parties who ended up with more than 537 votes. the question is that you can't have a third-party run.

do we only want to have two parties in the united states of america? >> rick, you wrote that nixonland is fears coexisting in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of americans. do americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another in cold blood overolitical and cultural disagreements? it would be hard to argue they do not. how did nixonland end and has not ended yet. we'rtalking about the tyranny of democracy. and we're in obamaland now. >> no, it's not nixonland, it's obamaland. but an african-american american candidate got 56 million votes for president. he got elected. mccain and obama together got 98.5% of the vote.

there was no great demand on the right or left for thi parties in this election. i think bob barr and nader together got less than 1% of the vote. you go to the second city of review, and the title is america all better. what i'm going to ask you is whether obama blows a hole to where the country is going. >> let me get started on that one on -- [applause] >> it's been a fascinati year. and a year of enormous transiti. we're really lucky to be alive anto be able to -- well, i was going to say open the newspaper, flip on the computer, and watch history happen. :